The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of ‘leisure towns’ as the chief resorts of wealthy consumers of a new range of goods and services. Their prosperity related closely to the growth of consumerism, but little attention has been given to the ways in which shopping and shops linked into the changing social, economic and physical structure of such towns. This paper explores these processes in the context of Chester – a classic, but largely neglected leisure town – and concludes that shopping streets became central to the economy of the city and amongst the most important of its social spaces.

Urban growth revealed problems associated with the administration of mid-sixteenth-century cities. In the Mediterranean area, and especially in Spain and France, a discrete discourse emerged in the late seventeenth century as to how towns and cities should be organized and administered. Contained in numerous tracts and manuals were ‘policy science’ recommendations to deal with environmental health and related matters. This article examines the evolution of ‘policy science’ in Spain which achieved its greatest prominence during Carlos III's reign (1759–88). It is a field of study which offers insights into urban customs, behaviour and beliefs, and had important implications for the subsequent morphology of the Spanish city.

This article attempts a detailed social portrait of Cape Town on the eve of apartheid. In the process it provides a rare cross-racial study of a twentieth-century South African city. The first section reveals a complex place already distinguished by considerable segregation and predictable social inequalities, both between and within racial and ethnic categories. Yet such findings are at odds with popular memories of a golden age – marked by tolerance, greater cohesion and security. So the second section explores and explains the differences. It finds that memories cannot simply be dismissed as myths.

This paper studies the evolution of urban form in both physical and social manifestations through an examination of the transformation of the Chinese capital from a planned imperial city into a modern metropolis in the early twentieth century. The newly created municipal government sought to modernize Beijing through public works to improve the old urban infrastructure. Consequently, city walls and gates were reconfigured; streets were paved, widened and expanded; and new rules of urban planning and zoning were introduced. Reflecting changes in political power relations, the modernist transformation in the urban built environment was evidently brought about by a combined force of Western influences and Chinese indigenous developments, especially by a shift in ideological allegiance from imperial authority to people's rights, by the state's increasing intervention in urban affairs, and by new technologies transmitted from the West.